Our View: Officials miss opportunity for 'lessons learned'

The day-long conference Monday at Boston University was billed as a discussion of “lessons learned” from the response to last year's Marathon bombings. Considering the dozens of agencies involved, the dramatic events of that week — a city locked down, two fierce shootouts in a Watertown neighborhood, an offi...

The day-long conference Monday at Boston University was billed as a discussion of “lessons learned” from the response to last year’s Marathon bombings. Considering the dozens of agencies involved, the dramatic events of that week — a city locked down, two fierce shootouts in a Watertown neighborhood, an officer killed after the suspects were publicly identified — such a discussion is worthwhile, if long overdue.

Unfortunately, what the conference produced was a lot of public officials patting each other on the back for what a great job they had done in Boston’s week of trial. There were moments of defensiveness: Gov. Deval Patrick stressing that he simply asked, rather than ordered, people to stay home from work on April 19; former Police Commissioner Ed Davis defending his decision to release the photos of suspects still at large. But there were few moments of reflection. Apparently nobody responsible did a single thing that week that they wish they had done differently.

Among the questions still unanswered concern the actions in Watertown, where hundreds of police participated in a one-sided firefight. How had Dzhokhar Tsarnaev manage to escape the army of heavily-armed officers? Why did it take so long to find him despite an unprecedented manhunt? Why did officers fire into the boat where Tsarnaev was hiding — as it turned out, wounded and unarmed?

But Patrick on Monday had nothing but praise for that operation. “When the order was given to hold their fire, they held their fire,” he said. “The restraint of law enforcement under those circumstances was a thing to behold.”

Apparently the “lesson learned” is if officers stop shooting before managing to execute an unarmed suspect before he can be questioned, it’s cause for commendation.

Then there’s the suspect who didn’t survive his interrogation. A Florida prosecutor this week at last released his report on the death of Ibragim Todashev, a friend of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, while being questioned last May by a Boston-based FBI agent and two Massachusetts State Police troopers.

Jeffrey Ashton’s report on the killing of Todashev exonerates the officers involved and provides details of the incident that should have been made public long ago. As in just about every case of an officer-involved shooting, Ashton confined his inquiry to whether the officers committed any crime for which they should be prosecuted, and concluded that they hadn’t. He offered no conclusions on why three armed, trained law enforcement professionals couldn’t restrain and question an unarmed suspect without anyone ending up dead. No “lessons learned” there, and Ashton’s report is unlikely to disarm the conspiracy theories that have grown in the absence of independent, transparent and credible investigations.

Page 2 of 2 - Events like these, involving multiple agencies responding to dangerous, unprecedented situations, should always be followed by a comprehensive review — not to affix blame, but to determine what worked well, what systems fell short, and what lessons should be learned.